The massive William Kentridge Five Themes at SFMOMA is a generous, almost overwhelming, gift to the Bay Area arts community; as was noted to me by a friend, it is difficult to think of another contemporary artist whose ambition is as wide-ranging as Kentridge's. The works on view, mostly made since 1990, incorporate history, politics, ecology, philosophy, and the aesthetics of visual, performing, and media arts. The themes referred to in the title are an indication of this wide spectrum of thought: Ubu Roi, the 19th century play about despotism; Soho and Felix, two characters from Kentridge's earlier work in... Read More

This February, SFMOMA opened it biannual acknowledgment of local, emerging contemporary artists with the 2008 SECA Art Award exhibition. As exhibitions are only shadows of their development processes, it is necessary to recount the narrative of this project in order to understand its culmination. A somewhat bizarre approach, comprised of studio visits coordinated by the busload, and curators resembling cultural tour guides--replete with itineraries and megaphones--the award selection process is nevertheless undeniably exacting and unique. Since 1967, the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA)--an organization of SFMOMA patrons--has sponsored this Award, which culminates in an exhibition at the... Read More

In 1971, Ant Farm hit the road in The Media Van - a Chevy turned nomadic Television studio. The art collective made several cross-country trips, documenting their voyages with brand new Sony Portapaks. They lectured at colleges, staged happenings, and dragged the public into their performances. Conceptually minded and thoroughly wired, Ant Farm's project embraced a utopian ideal of distributed media power and offered up an alternative concept of a television "network." The artists (1) updated the van for The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A lot has changed in 38... Read More

In her San Francisco exhibition as part of SF MOMA's "New Work" series, Mai-Thu Perret employs a language of symbols to refer to a private world, a society of her own invention. The range of her influences is wide and the materials are refined but still somewhat roughly constructed when necessary, for example in Sylvania, the faceless papier-mache figure who is contrastingly adorned in a couture dress inspired by wood grain and raising her arms in adoration and celebration, possibly of the very textures that she bears on her body and in her namesake. Piles and clumps of vaguely recognizable... Read More

A. H. Binden, Lightning, 1888; gelatin silver print. Recognizing the materiality, lineage, recurrence, and confluence of diverse modes of imaging ties them to a shifting earthly reality instead of to a vague "something" existing immaterially above or transcendentally beyond. Understanding that instruments belong to a broader technological system and are integral to connective theories and practices of visual communication allows us to situate them with a more inclusive endeavor, where art and science do not so much rival each other as intermingle and branch. -Barbara Maria Stafford, "Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains," Devices of Wonder Brought to Light: Photography and the... Read More

Installation views at New York's MOMA Martin Puryear's exhibition has crossed the country, hopping from one august institution to another. During this migration it has settled itself into the baroquely tinged confines of the National Gallery's West Wing, as well as the cavernously spare quarters of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For such a studiously formal show it has adapted surprisingly well to each new home. In its San Francisco iteration at SF MOMA, the show has again elegantly inhabited its vessel. The space is methodically filled with a generous and sensitive offering of work. Pieces... Read More

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was an American artist and sculptor who helped pioneer and later became the most famous practitioner of assemblage art. His works are often regarded as avant-garde and highly influenced by Surrealism (although he never considered himself an orthodox Surrealist). He is most famous for his "boxes," which are currently and numerously displayed at SFMOMA. Untitled (Tilly Losch), 1935-38 Cornell created his assemblages by carefully arranging found objects and framing them in boxes. These boxes are relatively simple constructions, usually made of wood, and often glass-fronted. Like the Surrealist arts that likely influenced him, his art is comprised... Read More

I was greeted by a familiar yellow glare when I stepped off the elevator into Olafur Eliasson's survey Take Your Time. In the fall of 2003, I had the pleasure of seeing The Weather Project, his seminal work that was a commission for the Tate Modern's massive Turbine Hall. To say it was impressive is a pale understatement: upon arrival, my friend Jen and I followed the glow of that yellow through the museum entrance, and when we rounded the corner into the hall, she clawed my arm and gasped "Oh...My...Lord!" (she's Texan). At the end of the five hundred-foot-long... Read More

A ghostly presence by German artist Felix Schramm appears to have been propelled through the walls of SF MOMA and lodged tightly within its 4th floor galleries. Titled Collider 2007, the installation is monumental in scale, and brings to mind the New Jersey house that Gordon Matta-Clark carved in two (Splitting, 1974). Imagine if Matta-Clark's house was further split apart, and if bisecting sections of its torn, peeling walls were catapulted through the modern museum's pristine white box by something approximating the force and speed of a tornado, or better yet, Hurricane Katrina. This may give you a sense of... Read More

Phil Collins' suite of recent videos at San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art has enthralled museum-goers. From old married couples and baby-boomer professionals to college-aged hipsters and loud-mouthed teenagers, these captivating pieces provide a reason to congregate. They glue patrons to their seats, garnering patience and attention that is rare in the context of an art institution. At just shy of an hour, this video projection is titled The World Won't Listen, after a 1987 Smiths album of the same name (it is the second of three works to bear that title). Its genesis lied in a poster advertising the... Read More

With only a few exceptions, SFMoma has remained detached from the tangle of socially oriented projects that have embroiled the art community of the Bay Area in recent years. So it's particularly interesting to see the work of Phil Collins in the "New Work" section of the museum. On one hand, the presence of this project underscores SFMoma's "international focus" which more often than not translates as distance from the themes (and artists) being addressed in the Bay Area. On the other hand it could be a sign that SFMoma is starting to come around.... Read More

Matthew Barney's film and related exhibit Drawing Restraint 9 at SFMOMA in the Summer of 2006 plays itself out as a poor follow-up to what can be seen as his magnificent opus and Gesamtkunstwerk: the Cremaster Cycle. Barney's new film and supporting exhibition portray a far-fetched, overly personal and extremely drawn-out (pun intended...) marriage ceremony between Barney and his pop-star wife Björk. Was it necessary to make a feature length film and further design a traveling film-prop exhibition at SFMOMA to show the world that he and Björk are sea-crossed lovers, clandestine whales in human form, delighters of Eastern tradition...as... Read More

Cardiff's video-guided wandering through the halls and white walls of SFMoma alternates between Brechtian style detachment and hyper-suspension of disbelief. The result is a feeling of euphoria, but the work also leads to reflections on the mnemonics of time and space. It seems to accomplish this impossible conflation by splitting one's attention in two, part looking at the video camera screen and part looking at the physical world as it passes by. Comparing snapshots of attention can make traversing a spectator filled museum a harrowing endeavor. There are moments of reprieve from the people dodging, however, when Cardiff turns toward... Read More